The New Beginner's Guide to USB Port Configuration

[UtterDisbelief]

Okay, I looked in BIOS and found the option disable Wifi. Nowhere can you disable Bluetooth, but I went ahead and disabled the Wifi and rebooted.
It may have made some difference. For the first time I was able to connect my bluetooth keyboard and type with it... for about 1 minute.
I then opened IOReg and the red text with strikethrough started adding up as I'd scroll, my keyboard disconnected, and now won't work again. When I opened bluetooth settings in System Prefs, I got the beachball.

I've seen some have had to physically remove the Wifi/Bluetooth card on their MoBo, but since I was able to disable Wifi, and it did seem to make a difference for a moment, do you think there's another way to solve this other than physically removing the Wifi card?

btw, even with my wired keyboard, input is not consistently working. Sometimes there'll be a long delay, or repeated inputs. It almost feels like the MBP butterfly keyboard problem Apple experienced with their last gen.

Hmmm. You are certainly drilling down into this problem

Now the interferrence of the two cards is resolved, the connection/disconnection thing might just be the aerials/antennae on the Fenvi card. With my own setup I had similar problems and now use a desktop aerial that connects via cables to the original sockets. It's actually a Gigabyte one. Indeed there's a thread about this:

[PRO TIP] Get better WiFi/BT Signal when using PCIe BT/WiFi Card in a Tower Case

A few months back I added a PCIe WiFi & BT card to my desktop Hackintosh system. The card I bought was based on the BCM943602CS chipset which is a 3x3 MIMO device and is natively supported by MacOS, these cards can be found cheap on eBay for around £30.00 (approx $37): The card included three...

www.tonymacx86.com

This might be a next-step in your investigation. However if your PC case is on your desk, then maybe not. A better signal should help reduce sporadic disconnections. Certainly I need my Magic Mouse to be within a foot or so of the aerial.

As for the wired keyboard showing problems. Is it an Apple keyboard or some other brand? Not that it should make a difference. That is possibly something else taking USB resources...

 

[Covalt]

Hmmm. You are certainly drilling down into this problem

Now the interferrence of the two cards is resolved, the connection/disconnection thing might just be the aerials/antennae on the Fenvi card. With my own setup I had similar problems and now use a desktop aerial that connects via cables to the original sockets. It's actually a Gigabyte one. Indeed there's a thread about this:

[PRO TIP] Get better WiFi/BT Signal when using PCIe BT/WiFi Card in a Tower Case

A few months back I added a PCIe WiFi & BT card to my desktop Hackintosh system. The card I bought was based on the BCM943602CS chipset which is a 3x3 MIMO device and is natively supported by MacOS, these cards can be found cheap on eBay for around £30.00 (approx $37): The card included three...

www.tonymacx86.com

This might be a next-step in your investigation. However if your PC case is on your desk, then maybe not. A better signal should help reduce sporadic disconnections. Certainly I need my Magic Mouse to be within a foot or so of the aerial.

As for the wired keyboard showing problems. Is it an Apple keyboard or some other brand? Not that it should make a difference. That is possibly something else taking USB resources...

That's a really cool tip on the bluetooth reception issues, but after further testing I don't think that's my issue.
I've put my bluetooth keyboard right next to the antennas (my desktop is on my desk) and it reacts the same way.
I can connect it, it kind of works for 3 minutes, and then it's lost. When I go to bluetooth settings, I get a spinning beachball. Definitely something conflicting.
Also have ruled out the bluetooth for testing right now - even my wired keyboard is having more issues than normal (entered keys won't appear, etc).
It's a genuine Apple usb keyboard that came with a 2010 Mac Pro.
Do I need to remove more USB stuff with Hackintool (I'm at 15 now).
I've not been able to find what USR1 and USR2 are for.. wondering if I should remove them?

 

[Covalt]

Hmmm. You are certainly drilling down into this problem

As for the wired keyboard showing problems. Is it an Apple keyboard or some other brand? Not that it should make a difference. That is possibly something else taking USB resources...

Hi @UtterDisbelief , more testing. For now I'm not even worrying about bluetooth, just want to figure out this USB mess
I removed more ports with Hackintool, but it actually seems to make my(wired) keyboard respond even worse. Hard to even login because it won't accept all my key inputs.
What is interesting to me is how IOReg seems to wig out when I have it open and continually is adding red items; shows something is happening in the background and it's confused.
See the screenshot: this red chunk goes on for a long time and keeps adding as I write this.

Here's my current USB view in Hackintool:

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Hi @UtterDisbelief , more testing. For now I'm not even worrying about bluetooth, just want to figure out this USB mess
I removed more ports with Hackintool, but it actually seems to make my(wired) keyboard respond even worse. Hard to even login because it won't accept all my key inputs.
What is interesting to me is how IOReg seems to wig out when I have it open and continually is adding red items; shows something is happening in the background and it's confused.
See the screenshot: this red chunk goes on for a long time and keeps adding as I write this.
View attachment 454239

Here's my current USB view in Hackintool:
View attachment 454240

I'm sorry, I don't know what could be making your USB devices, of all types, spontaneously disconnect. Usually this happens to external drives not receiving enough power via USB. This is well understood and can be worked around using SSDT-EC.aml and SSDT-USBX.aml ACPI patches.

Other than that, I don't know of any macOS processes that would do this. Maybe drivers for external hardware, but then they wouldn't survive long as a product in the real world so it's very unlikely.

Although I don't like recommending it for many reasons (activations, data-loss etc) personally I'd do a fresh, clean install to see if that helped.

I know you are working on this build with @pastrychef in another thread, so good luck getting to the bottom of it .

 

[pastrychef]

Hi @UtterDisbelief , more testing. For now I'm not even worrying about bluetooth, just want to figure out this USB mess
I removed more ports with Hackintool, but it actually seems to make my(wired) keyboard respond even worse. Hard to even login because it won't accept all my key inputs.
What is interesting to me is how IOReg seems to wig out when I have it open and continually is adding red items; shows something is happening in the background and it's confused.
See the screenshot: this red chunk goes on for a long time and keeps adding as I write this.
View attachment 454239

Here's my current USB view in Hackintool:
View attachment 454240

You have a Wacom device connected to your keyboard? Are you sure it's not drawing too much power?

Is the keyboard the only thing giving you issues? Have you tried another keyboard?

 

[Covalt]

You have a Wacom device connected to your keyboard? Are you sure it's not drawing too much power?

Is the keyboard the only thing giving you issues? Have you tried another keyboard?

The Wacom isn’t connected to the keyboard, it’s plugged into an Anker hub, which the keyboard was also plugged into.
But I also tried unplugging everything except the keyboard going directly into one USB port on the mobo that was enabled.. still have the same problem.

 

[pastrychef]

The Wacom isn’t connected to the keyboard, it’s plugged into an Anker hub, which the keyboard was also plugged into.
But I also tried unplugging everything except the keyboard going directly into one USB port on the mobo that was enabled.. still have the same problem.

Is the keyboard the only device giving you problems?

Have you tried another keyboard?

Are you sure the keyboard is not defective?

 

[Covalt]

Is the keyboard the only device giving you problems?

Have you tried another keyboard?

Are you sure the keyboard is not defective?

Good question, once I’m back in the studio I’ll try another keyboard. We’ve got probably 10 Apple keyboards around so I’ll see if any others act differently.

 

[konsti]

Hi @headkaze and @UtterDisbelief I would like your kind insight and feedback one last time, as a follow up to my previous post. On my Intel NUC8i7BEH2 there are (via lspci):

• Intel Corporation Coffee Lake USB 3.1 xHCI Controller [8086:9ded]
• JHL6340 Thunderbolt 3 USB 3.1 Controller (Alpine Ridge) [8086:15db]

The system works now well with USBInjectAll.kext and SSDT-UIAC.aml where I now declare the ports for both USB hardware, please see my attached DSL file. On Hackintool I get all ports now as expected and was considering transitioning to USBPorts.kext now which I generated today via Hackintool.

However, I see that USBPorts.kext doesn't discriminate between this double USB hardware but rather, lists all ports in the same tree in its Info.plist. If you see my DSL file, I make two different entries per hardware on my NUC8.

How can we do that in USBPorts.kext? Will I have a problem if I boot with the attached USBPorts.kext that has both these hardware ports mentioned inside the same "XHC" enumeration, or do you think I will need to rename the USB-C PCI tree-device in Clover to something like XHCC etc. so the USBPorts.kext is properly structured and detected?

My worry is that, as you can see, I have dual entries as port 0x01 and 0x03, each belonging to USB v3 and USB-C.

Do you know if a) USBPorts.kext allows dual hardware ID reference same as SSDT-UIAC and b) will this attached generated USBPorts.kext work correctly in your opinion, as the ports are listed all under the same device name "XHC"?

Thank you very much in advance for your feedback.

 

[Covalt]

Hi @UtterDisbelief I'm back
@pastrychef hooked me up with an EFI with extreme bare essentials so I can work on my USB ports and test stability knowing that kexts have nothing to do with any issues I may experience.
(using Clover now)
I went through your guide again, removed USB ports using Hackintool to get down to 15.
Sadly, I'm still getting really erratic keyboad inputs. I have nothing plugged into my machine now except my Apple USB keyboard, and in the side of that is my Logitech mouse receiver.
However, when I look at IOReg, I still see this:

And that red text just cycles along, adding more and more as I leave the window open.
I don't know why I'd be seeing "WacomTabletDrive" when no Wacom is plugged into my machine right now.